NYU Wagner

Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, Second Edition, 2008 pp 1285-1288

Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Ed. Sage Publications, 2008.

This chapter tells the story of our decision to introduce participation as a key feature of a qualitative research project about social change leadership. We analyze the context that influenced our choice to create a ‘hybrid' design; discuss the subsequent choices we made about
our ‘positionality' vis-à-vis research participations and the kind of knowledge we produced; and reflect on the tensions these choices created with respect to control over the research process, its action orientation, and whose voice was represented. Embracing participation enriched the research but also provided hard-earned lessons about the trade-offs of taking the action turn.

Forthcoming in Leadership Quarterly

Sensegiving -- shaping how people understand themselves, their work, and others engaged in that work -- is critical to the work of organizational leadership. We propose the –cognitive shift,– a change in how an organizational audience understands an important element of the organization–s work, as a desired outcome of the sensegiving process. Organizations try to spur these shifts in two categories: about their issue and about their primary constituency, the population it is designed to serve or mobilize. This approach makes two contributions: It re-directs attention from individual leaders– behaviors and characteristics to the work of leadership, as opposed to the agents through which it is carried out. Second, it operationalizes the intangible process of meaning-making by breaking it down into discrete units that are relatively equivalent and, therefore, comparable, providing a systematic way to analyze and map cognitive leadership processes.

Reforma y Democracia, CLAD, Venezuela, No. 35(2006), pp. 93-122

Public Administration Review, July/August 2005, Vol 65, No. 4.

Maintaining a vibrant field of public administration requires ongoing efforts to link the worlds of academic researchers and practitioners. We suggest that research itself, traditionally pursued by academics, is a promising mechanism for making this connection. In particular, researchers and practitioners in public administration can do research together in a way that enhances mutual learning, draws on the strengths of each to create useful knowledge of high quality, appreciates and tolerates of each others' worlds, styles, and contributions. Using research to promote connectedness means rethinking the roles that practitioners and academics play in generating knowledge in the field. In our project, insights from the assumptions and practices of narrative inquiry helped us to identify three research roles for practitioners: as sources of knowledge, as producers of knowledge, and as active consumers who inform the research process.

Public Administration Review, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 143.

A traditional view of scholarly quality defines rigor as the application of method and assumes an implicit connection with relevance. But as an applied field, public administration requires explicit attention to both rigor and relevance. Interpretive scholars' notions of rigor demand an explicit inclusion of relevance as an integral aspect of quality. As one form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry illuminates how this can be done. Appreciating this contribution requires a deeper knowledge of the logic of narrative inquiry, an acknowledgement of the diversity of narrative approaches, and attention to the implications for judging its quality. We use our story about community-based leadership research to develop and illustrate this argument.

Public Management Review, Spring 2004, Vol 6, no. 2, pp. 230-251.

The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.

In David Cooperrider and Michel Avital (eds), Advances in Appreciative Inquiry Vol 1: Constructive Discourse and Human Organization. 2004. Elsevier Science, Ltd.

This chapter explores the potential of appreciative inquiry for doing empirical work on leadership. We use a framework that matches a constructionist theoretical lens, an appreciative and participative stance, a focus on the work of leadership (as opposed to leaders), and multiple methods of inquiry (narrative, ethnographic and cooperative). We elaborate on our experiences with narrative inquiry, while highlighting the value of doing narrative inquiry in an appreciative manner. Finally, we suggest that this particular framework is helping us see how social change leadership work reframes the value that the larger society attributes to members of vulnerable communities.

Public Administration Review, July 2003, vol.63, no.4, pp. 455-471(17) Blackwell Publishing Inc.

This article proposes a theory of how mandated institutional cooperation transforms into individual cooperative behavior. Using qualitative strategies, we draw insights about cooperation in three public-sector efforts of labor-management cooperation (LMC). We report an association between critical shifts in the roles of stakeholders and the change from adversarial to cooperative labor relations. While managers became team players along with their employees, labor representatives assumed managerial responsibilities. These changes were also associated with a service-oriented perspective, better understanding of the other's experiences, and a view of cooperation as partnership. At the heart of these transformations, we found critical changes in communication patterns associated with incrementally growing levels of trust. We propose a model that depicts the links between collective and individual levels of organizational action related to LMC. We conclude that the positive shifts in mental models regarding work and the value of cooperation justify the promotion of LMC efforts.

(A Research Agenda about Outcome Evaluation of Public Management) in Cunill, Nuria, Ospina, Sonia (ed.) Evaluaci–n de Resultados para una Gesti–n P–blica Moderna y Democr–tica. Experiencias Latinoamericanas. Venezuela: CLAD–Editorial Texto, 2003, pp. 11-42.